Rambo
PUBLISHER: Acclaim
DEVELOPER: Pack-In-Video
RELEASE DATE: Dec. 4th, 1987 (JP), May 1988 (US)
John Rambo can’t help but kill people. I don’t think he wants to kill, necessarily, but if you’ve seen the incredible “First Blood,” the cartoonish 80s sequels, or the gritty old-man reboots, you know that he just excels at combat of all kinds. The man, for all intents and purposes, is war. So what then to make of his bizarre stabbing motion in his NES game?
Before I cover Rambo’s strange knife skills, let’s cover how we got here. Colonel Trautman gives Rambo a choice: stay in jail or help the US military rescue some POWs still stuck in ‘Nam. Rambo accepts the offer and is dropped off back in the jungle where he was formed. At first all seems well. He meets some other folks in a hanger, acquires some throwing knives, then gets kicked out into the jungle to complete his mission.
His initial enemies are the traditional jungle lot, snakes and spiders and enormous moths. And it’s here where we see something’s gone horribly wrong with Rambo. He doesn’t stab straight ahead, he swings his knife overhead, like he’s cutting vines that are in his way. But there are no vines, dear reader. No vines, ever. Just hordes of snakes, spiders, moths, and eventually, piranhas, flying skulls, tigers, gorillas and oh so many more. Sure, Rambo eventually gets other weapons, like grenades, throwing knives and machine guns, and they work like you’d expect. But you know what’s hilarious? As you kill enemies, you get experience points and the only item the points count towards is leveling up – you guessed it – your combat knife. The one that Rambo doesn’t know how to use.
Now, to be clear…. If you were a child in 1988, and your parents got this game for you for your birthday, you could figure out how to slice fools the way John Rambo does. You could figure out how to navigate the incredibly confusing labyrinthine Vietnam jungles. And you might even discern why, if John Rambo is the embodiment of war and the battlefield and all that, he doesn’t seem to move very well. Perhaps, given enough time and hours in the jungle, you might not care that the game doesn’t feel like an enjoyable exploratory adventure, but rather a tiresome slog. But you would only do these things because video games are expensive, and Rambo is your only option.
Interestingly, if you’ve ever played Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Rambo’s gameplay style will look awfully familiar. Both games are filled with short side-scrolling sections complete with janky combat interrupted by safe zones where you can talk to people and figure out where to go next. Even the experience point numbers that appear when you kill an enemy use the same font found in Zelda II.
Rambo doesn’t have a top-down map like Zelda II does, but even with this omission, it’s not hard to see where developers Pack-In Video got their main inspiration. This would be most obvious in Japan, where Zelda II came out in January 1987 and Rambo would release later in December of the same year. But in America? Rambo predates Zelda II’s release by seven months. American gamers who played Rambo first might have thought Nintendo was cribbing notes from a very bizarre source.
Rambo himself might consider the jungle better than prison, but we know better because we are free men and women with the power of choice. Prison is slow death, but the jungle is quick death, death by a thousand snake bites or gorilla punches or tiger mauls. Either way, there’s no escaping your ultimate fate. Unless, of course, you choose not to play Rambo, in which case you are and will forever be gloriously alive.
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A worse version of what was for decades considered a bad Zelda game... boy, you know how to sell 'em!
I remember playing Rambo as a weekend video store rental. I am 100% sure I never made it very far and I only picked it up because it was freaking Sylvester Stallone on the cover and it was Rambo. These licensed games had it so easy back then. Make a cool cartridge label or box art and you get sales.